1.5.5-Aphraseremains
Brick!Club 1.5.5 Flickers on the horizon It’s JAVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERT It’s also time for some exciting justification of Hugo’s animal symbolism. Animals are representations of humanity’s vices and virtues? Uh, okay. Javert is the wolf-pup that if allowed to grow up will devour his mother’s other offspring. Do we take that as he’s a danger to the criminal classes or as he’s a danger to everyone? He found himself outside society and so joined the non-criminal class of people “whom society keeps at an arm’s length”. There’s a definite thing in 19th century depictions of the police, where they’re alarming because they’re so closely connected to the criminal class, that being rather necessary if you want to catch criminals. I’m interested by how this fits into that pattern, both in terms of Javert being born in a jail, starting out outside of society, and in terms of the more general connections being drawn here between criminals and the police as people who aren’t really part of society. But anyway, Javert is kind of worrying. He has an absolute respect for authority and views crimes through the lens of revolt against authority – views them in relation to respect for the social hierarchy rather than the effect on people. This is, obviously, a considerable problem. And he is, at this point, the only person in town who doesn’t like M. Madeleine, because, surprisingly in this book, he is in fact capable of recognizing someone by their face, even if he may not know exactly why he recognizes Madeleine yet. (And on the hints to the reader side of things, it’s casually mentioned that Javert had in his youth been a prison-warder in the Midi. Gosh, I wonder who Madeleine reminds him of.) Also, although he reads in his spare time, he hates reading. That’s always a bad sign, especially in a book so concerned with education. Commentary Sarah1281 At least Javert does not enjoy romance novels. That would just make him irredeemable. Perhaps it is romance novels that he is reading and that is why he hates it so much. I find it interesting that polcie officers are hated about as much as criminals (according to something I read but can’t remember the source, they were hated more) and thus probably at the very least shunned. I know that some officers abused their power but it’s just another example of french peasants not behaving as rational individuals and mistreating people who have the power to harm them. Nerves of steel, there. If I didn’t like cops I wouldn’t do anything to try and anger them, especially if I believed that they were practically criminals anyway, lest I find myself arrested. Doeskin-pantaloons I took the wolf-pup thing as: if he’d actually been in society, he would have been a danger to everyone (thus, a criminal), which is why he decided to become a cop instead. Which I guess makes a nice change from his mother eating him instead. At least he got some autonomy. Alternatively - the wolf-mother is society itself, and it could either eat him (he becomes a criminal) or he could eat everyone else (he spends his life hunting people down, and making things hard for them).